Moment in Peking

... But Mulan was a child of Peking. She had grown up there and had drunk in all the richness of life of the city which enveloped its inhabitants like a great mother soft toward all the children’s requests, fulfilling all their whims and desires, or like a huge thousand-year-old tree in which the insects making their home in one branch did not know what the insects in the other branch were doing. She had learned from Peking its tolerance, geniality, and urbanity, as we all in our formative years catch something of the city and country we live in. she had grown up with the yellow-roofed palaces and the purple and greenroofed temples, and the broad boulevards and the long, crooked alleys, the busy thoroughfares and the quiet districts that were almost rural in their effect; the common man’s homes with their inevitable pomegranate trees and jars of goldfish, no less than the rich man’s mansions and gardens; the open-air tea houses where men loll on rattan armchairs under cypress trees, spending twenty cents for a whole afternoon in summer; the enclosed teashops where in winter men eat steaming-hot mutton fried with onion and drink pehkan and where the great rub shoulders with the humble; the wonderful theatres, the beautiful restaurants, the bazaars, the lantern streets and the curio man’s shop credits and poor man’s pleasures, the openair jugglers, magicians, and acrobats of Shihshahai and the cheap operas of Tienchiao; the beauty and variety of the pedlars’ street-cries, the tuning forks of itinerant barbers, the drums of second-hand goods dealers working from house to house, the brass bowls of the sellers of iced dark plum drinks, each and every one clanging in the most perfect rhythm; the pomp of wedding and funeral processions half-a-mile long and official sedan chairs and retinues; the Manchu women contrasting with the Chinese camel caravans from the Mongolian desert and the Lama priests and the Buddhist monks; the public entertainers, sword swallowers and beggars, each pursuing his profession with freedom and an unwritten code of honor sanctioned by century-old custom; the rich humanity of beggars and “beggar kings,” thieves and thieves’ protectors, mandarins and retired scholars, saints and prostitutes, chaste sing-song artists and profligate widows, monks’ kept mistresses and eunuchs’ sons, amateur singers and “opera maniacs”; and the hearty and humorous common people.

Mulan’s imagination had been keenly stimulated by her childhood in this city. She had learned the famous Peking nursery rhymes with their witty commentary on life. She had, as a child, trailed on the ground beautiful rabbit lanterns on wheels and watched with fascination the fireworks, shadow plays, and Punch-and-Judy shows. She had listened to blind minstrel singers telling of ancient heroes and lovers, and “big-drum” storytellers by whom the beauty of the Pekinese language was brought to perfection of sound and rhythm and artistry. From these monologue declamations she had first realized the beauty of language, and from every day conversations she had unconsciously learned that quiet, unperturbed, and soothing style of Pekinese conversation. She learned through the annual festivals the meaning of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, a system of festivals which regulates life like a calendar from the beginning to the end of the year, and enables man to live in close touch with the year’s rhythm and with nature. She had absorbed the imperial glamour of the Forbidden City and ancient institutions of learning, the religious glamour of Buddhist, Taoist, Tibetan, and Mohammedan temples and their rites and ceremonies and the Confucian Temple of Heaven and Altar of Heaven; the social and domestic glamour of rich homes and parties and exchange of presents; and the historic glamour of ancient pagodas, bridges, towers, archways, queens’ tombs, and poets’ residences, where every brick was fraught with legend, history, and mystery...

-- An excerpt from Moment in Peking written by Lin Yutang in 1939